Here is a quick tip that you can use in QGIS expressions, T-SQL, or even PostgresSQL.

Normally if you have a column that you need query on to find all the NULL or zeros you have to do something like this:

COLA IS NULL OR COLA = 0

Well that isn’t too bad. Sure yeah it’s fine for one column but what if you have three and you need to check them all together

(COLA IS NULL OR COLA = 0) AND (COLB IS NULL OR COLB = 0) AND (COLC IS NULL OR COLC = 0)

That is pretty long and gets hard to read pretty quick.

To cut this down we can use the coalesce function – T-SQL, PostgresSQL, QGIS Expression. The coalesce function returns the first non-NULL value out of an expression, or list of values. So if you do something like this:

coalesce(NULL, "A", 0)

You will get “A” because the first value is NULL. The function will just evaluate each value/expression until something turns up that isn’t NULL.

Using that logic we can replace the above function with the following:

For everyone working with spatial databases in QGIS there comes a time when “Add PostGIS/SpatiaLite Layer” and “RT Sql Layer” start to be annoying. You always have to retype or copy-paste your SQL queries into the user interface if you need to change the tiniest thing in the layer’s definition.

This is where “Fast SQL Layer” can be a real time saver. Fast SQL Layer is a new plugin for QGIS by Pablo T. Carreira. It basically adds an SQL console for loading layers from PostGIS/SpatiaLite into QGIS. And it even comes with syntax highlighting!

Installation

Fast SQL Layer comes with one dependency: Pygments, which is used for syntax highlighting.

I downloaded and extracted Pygments-1.4.tar.gz, then in an OSGeo4W shell within the Pygments-1.4 directory, type python setup.py build then python setup.py install

Usage

When you activate the plugin in plugin manager, a dock widget will appear which contains the console and some fields for specifying the database connection that should be used. Then, you can simply write your SQL query and load the results with one click.

Fast SQL plugin

In this example, I renamed “gid” to “id”, but you can actually edit the values in the drop down boxes to adjust the column names for id and geometry:

A second layer loaded using Fast SQL plugin

It certainly needs some polishing on the user interface side but I really like it.